Preface
...to understand the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. (vii)
On sources:
"Official documents, such as departmental reports, program memos, syllabi, and catalogues, were perhaps the most obvious choices for study, yet we needed the memories of colleagues to flesh out our work. (ix)
...we ran advertisements in the alumni magazine...
sample undergraduate papers and course syllabi
This part kind of jives with the turn my own project is taking: "...to tell a recent history of writing program development" (v)
...each of us wanted to know...the historical conditions that influenced the composition program in which we were participating as teachers and administrators. (vii)
...the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. (vii)
Many of the struggles we recount here have been enacted at many other sites: budgetary constraints, institutional pressure, and personality conflicts are common sources of distress and motivators of change in almost every English department. We therefore offer this study as a point of comparison and contrast for those who are working at other institutions to historicize the development of their local writing programs. (vii)
Rather than tidying these disparate, filtered, and embedded traces or the past into a unified story of progress that would make Penn State's current program seem like the culmination of a steady, always admirable, and self reflective path of progress, we have tried to retain the messy traces of these conflicts within our narrative and to highlight how very unpredictable and contingent writing program development can be. (viii)
Introduction
Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs--sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)
History--that aggregate of options and identities offered to us by the material, intellectual, and cultural circumstances of the past--is centrally involved in choices about pedagogy. (3)
Sources to Consult:
Fragments of Rationality ("Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality provides three chapters of a broad history of composition from 1960 to 1990")
Framing Quotes:
...the 1970s--that formative decade in the development of composition studies that is just now "entering history," as it were (4)
on the 1970s: "...the rich, sometimes conflicting, sometimes even random intellectual and material hurly-burly of the period. Consequently, our field has been left without a sense of how all those individual moments were collectively influencing and impeding composition practices in the 1970s or how they generated competing, conflicting, and cooperating discourses at given moments that continue to resonate today. (4)
...but they are somewhat less serviceable for preserving the astonishing range of practices, personalities, and messy particulars that strove for a hearing, however temporarily, within the mixed aggregate that has been known as composition. (4)
...it nevertheless seems fair to say that, within composition studies, understanding of the era is incomplete, lacking in the rich, competing particulars that defined the period. (5)
Framing Moves (they've got me thinking, in particular, about what conversations my project speaks to or participates in)
1977 also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on writing program administration... (5)
This book consequently addresses this gap by... (6)
...we have maintained a continuing dialogue between the local and particular, on the one hand, and the broad and general, on the other: we consistently poise an account of developments at Penn State against national and disciplinary developments (7)
---
...we addressed several key questions, questions that both rely upon and extend the work of previous composition histories:
How are curricular designs in composition at specific institutions influenced by the assumptions and beliefs of particular faculty members and administrators? (6)
Ch. 2 Background I: The Cultural Scene in 1977
Colleges and universities sought to manage budget problems not only by reducing their faculties but also by increasing part-time positions and graduate assistantships. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the five-year period from 1972-1977 saw a dramatic increase in the number of part-time faculty in higher-education: in 1972, colleges and universities employed 3.17 full timers for every part-time faculty member; in 1977, the numbers had fallen to 1.26 full timers for every part-timer (Leslie, Kellams, and Gunne 23).
Ch. 3 Background II: English Studies in 1977
Enrollments in English in the 1970s plummeted almost everywhere. Nationally the number of English undergraduate degrees awarded plunged from an all-time high of 63,976 in academic year 1971-72 to 35,328 in 1977-78--the lowest figure in many years (National Center, tables 229 and 230). Of all bachelor's degrees granted in 1978, fewer than four percent were now in English (Neel and Nelson 51-53) as compared to 7.59 percent in 1968 (Franklin 6). (19)
During the 1960s, the number of English graduate programs had increased over 50 percent, from 81 to 124 (Geckle 43) and new PhD programs continued to appear on campuses during the 1970s. (19)
Ch. 4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation
Timeline of significant publications:
Donald Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968)
Ken Macrorie, Telling Writing (1970)
James Britton, Language and Learning (1970)
Janet Emig, Composing Process of 12th Graders (1971)
James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971)
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (1973)
Britton, et al, The Development of Writing Abilities (1975)
Coles, The Plural I (1978)
Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided "content" for students to write about. (30)
Process Pedagogies: Expressivists and Cognitivists
There is a really interesting discussion of Process Pedagogies on p. 31. The authors identify two kinds of process pedagogies: expressionist and cognitivist, both of which they refer to as "student centered pedagogies" (31).
Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressionists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the "composing process" of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as "process pedagogies." But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressionist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies. (31)
Expressivists
As the title Writing Without Teachers implies, expressionists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer's growth. Students were regarded as independent agents--even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant--who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error... a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher's nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressionism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication "Writing Before Writing" and then in his 1980 "Writing as Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning." (33)
In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressionists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which, by 1970, was beginning to compete with the expressionist school as the dominant process approach to composition. (33)
Cognitivists
By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. (34)
They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive "problem-solving" approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a "hierarchical set of subproblems" tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to "give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques" that good writers use to generate ideas in language and [...] construct those ideas into a written structure" suitable for a specific situation [449, 451] (34).
...Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like "pre-writing" or "revising" but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as "setting up goals," "finding operators," and "testing your writing against your own editor" ("Problem-Solving" 457-58) (34).
...by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages out to be considered in some way by writing teachers (35)
I got thinking about the teaching of writing teachers at UNH while I was reading this chapter...
Many English departments, often fitfully and in spite of themselves, coincidentally began to offer extensive teacher-training and graduate-level coursework--and then graduate degrees and emphases--in composition and rhetoric in order to develop a new generation of formally prepared teachers of composition. (78)
So, when was ENGL 810 or these other teaching-writing courses first offered? Early 1970s? I'll need to check catalogues at UNH. Who taught them? Was Murray's tenure of WPA of Freshman English the start of community around ENGL 401 there? What can I learn about the following things as they played out at UNH:
...pre-semester training sessions, required courses on pedagogical methods, weekly or bi-weekly staff meetings, prescribed syllabi, regular workshops, and mentoring programs for new teaching assistants (79).
Chapter 5, Composition in 1977: A Close Look at a Material Site
...we had reason to believe--and our reasons were borne out by our research--that the discussions about composition at Penn State's University Park campus in 1977 did indeed mirror (and complicate) in elaborate, telling, and consequential ways the discussion stat were taking place across the country about composition and did permit us to fill out our account of 1977 in ways that we could not have imagined beforehand. While Penn State's individual case is in some ways perhaps anomalous, it is in other ways highly instructive, for the general sense of crisis that animated the year 1977 as far as composition was concerned also animated the local institution--albeit with local twists. (86)
In the middle years of the 1970s, fissures had been developing in a successful system of writing instruction that had been in place for some years at Penn State. (86)
But as enrollments at Penn State increased, as the university pursued more of a research profile that emphasized faculty with doctorates, and as graduate studies in the English department consequently grew more important (and in keeping with most American universities, graduate studies in English meant literary study, not composition or creative writing), the formal designation "of composition" was phased out for English faculty, and composition instruction was gradually turned over to teaching assistants pursuing literary degrees. (92)
Making literature the focus of the course permitted literary scholars to promote and capitalize on their areas of interest. As Sharon Crowley has noted, "the practice of using literary texts in the required composition course carries enormous weight in the politics of English departments. [...] The presence of literature in that course affirms the status of literary studies as the defining activity of English studies" (Composition 87). The literature included within the composition courses at Penn STate performed such an affirmation, without question. The devotion to literary study kept to a minimum attention to composition and rhetoric. (95)
Chapter 6, Responding to the Crisis: Conversing about Composition at Penn State in 1977
Of what did the crisis consist?
...how to respond to increasing numbers of underprepared students, a statewide and university budgetary crisis, local visions of intellectual chaos and aimlessness in the humanities, and difficulties in English studies and in its composition program (105).
What did Ebbitts offer?
...[a] commitment to rhetorical education and her long-standing belief in the pedagogical seriousness required to teach composition" (106)
English 10: Expository Writing
English 20: Argumentative Writing ("The course aimed at analysis and argumentation for civic and practical purposes: to teach students to engage in public debates, to change policies or shape courses of action, to discover the causes of everyday opinions and phenomena" [109].)
The influence of process pedagogy...a four-page section dealing with how to teach "the process of composing in English 10 and 20 (111) and increased amount of prewriting and drafting (113)
In the spring of 1977, the Freshmen English Committee established as the first two goals of English 10 "to develop awareness of the nature of the composing process and help student improve their own procedures for composing, [...and] to introduce the art of invention--techniques for helping students discover what they know and have to say, want to say, need to say" (English 10 4). (113)
By 1977, instructors were expected to participate in students' writing processes by providing considerable feedback on student work-in-progress. (114)
Research in composition influenced English 20 in other ways... (115)
With the 1977 syllabus, then, English 20 had fully become the course in argument that Ebbitt and her associates had only begun to envision in 1975. The sequence of assignments reflected the composition programs' argument-centered, rhetorical-based, process-oriented philosophy of composition, responding directly to several currents of theoretical inquiry that had begun making their way into the program in the mid-1970s. (117)
Penn tate also began encouraging specific coursework in composition for graduate students to further ground them in the fundamentals of the subject...the department in 1977 began to require teaching assistants to take specific graduate coursework in composition theory: English 502, The Theory and Teaching of Composition, a three-credit seminar that some saw as a foundation course that would run parallel to the required introductory seminar in research methods, English 501. (it later became an elective and English 602 was created). (128)
They close with two conclusions...their's and one of the losers'. Here is theirs:
...traditionalists resisted the reforms of the mid-1970s, as best they could, for some years after. But in many ways, the opposition had lost. Though many faculty at University Park and the Commonwealth campuses for the next decade resisted to varying degrees the reforms of the mid1970s, over the long term what the winners called "reform" carried the day. By the end of 1977, Penn Staters had devised, out of a rather grand debate about a local crisis, a rather different composition program, one that amounted to a sustained professional response to a challenging set of new circumstances--circumstances nonetheless comparable to those in many other places and influenced by developments, intellectual and otherwise, around the country. (134)
By the fall of 1978, however, Frank, Ebbitt, and Park had arranged for four new tenure-line faculty to work on the problems. (134)
And so the reforms remained in place--a foundation to maintain and build on. By the spring of 1978, matters had been resolved at Penn State, for better or for worse, in a way that would last for five years until a change [in the academic calendar] prompted additional revisions. Those revisions, governed by insights gained by the invention of the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in 1981... (135)
The story of composition at Penn State in the 1970s can be read as a story of progress, a story of barriers overcome, improvements instituted, changes successfully negotiated. But there is another way of interpreting the events we have recounted, one that is not so happy... (135)
Ch. 2 Background I: The Cultural Scene in 1977
Colleges and universities sought to manage budget problems not only by reducing their faculties but also by increasing part-time positions and graduate assistantships. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the five-year period from 1972-1977 saw a dramatic increase in the number of part-time faculty in higher-education: in 1972, colleges and universities employed 3.17 full timers for every part-time faculty member; in 1977, the numbers had fallen to 1.26 full timers for every part-timer (Leslie, Kellams, and Gunne 23).
Ch. 3 Background II: English Studies in 1977
Enrollments in English in the 1970s plummeted almost everywhere. Nationally the number of English undergraduate degrees awarded plunged from an all-time high of 63,976 in academic year 1971-72 to 35,328 in 1977-78--the lowest figure in many years (National Center, tables 229 and 230). Of all bachelor's degrees granted in 1978, fewer than four percent were now in English (Neel and Nelson 51-53) as compared to 7.59 percent in 1968 (Franklin 6). (19)
During the 1960s, the number of English graduate programs had increased over 50 percent, from 81 to 124 (Geckle 43) and new PhD programs continued to appear on campuses during the 1970s. (19)
Ch. 4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation
Timeline of significant publications:
Donald Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968)
Ken Macrorie, Telling Writing (1970)
James Britton, Language and Learning (1970)
Janet Emig, Composing Process of 12th Graders (1971)
James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971)
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (1973)
Britton, et al, The Development of Writing Abilities (1975)
Coles, The Plural I (1978)
Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided "content" for students to write about. (30)
Process Pedagogies: Expressivists and Cognitivists
There is a really interesting discussion of Process Pedagogies on p. 31. The authors identify two kinds of process pedagogies: expressionist and cognitivist, both of which they refer to as "student centered pedagogies" (31).
Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressionists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the "composing process" of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as "process pedagogies." But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressionist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies. (31)
Expressivists
As the title Writing Without Teachers implies, expressionists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer's growth. Students were regarded as independent agents--even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant--who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error... a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher's nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressionism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication "Writing Before Writing" and then in his 1980 "Writing as Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning." (33)
In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressionists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which, by 1970, was beginning to compete with the expressionist school as the dominant process approach to composition. (33)
Cognitivists
By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. (34)
They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive "problem-solving" approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a "hierarchical set of subproblems" tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to "give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques" that good writers use to generate ideas in language and [...] construct those ideas into a written structure" suitable for a specific situation [449, 451] (34).
...Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like "pre-writing" or "revising" but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as "setting up goals," "finding operators," and "testing your writing against your own editor" ("Problem-Solving" 457-58) (34).
...by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages out to be considered in some way by writing teachers (35)
I got thinking about the teaching of writing teachers at UNH while I was reading this chapter...
Many English departments, often fitfully and in spite of themselves, coincidentally began to offer extensive teacher-training and graduate-level coursework--and then graduate degrees and emphases--in composition and rhetoric in order to develop a new generation of formally prepared teachers of composition. (78)
So, when was ENGL 810 or these other teaching-writing courses first offered? Early 1970s? I'll need to check catalogues at UNH. Who taught them? Was Murray's tenure of WPA of Freshman English the start of community around ENGL 401 there? What can I learn about the following things as they played out at UNH:
...pre-semester training sessions, required courses on pedagogical methods, weekly or bi-weekly staff meetings, prescribed syllabi, regular workshops, and mentoring programs for new teaching assistants (79).
Chapter 5, Composition in 1977: A Close Look at a Material Site
...we had reason to believe--and our reasons were borne out by our research--that the discussions about composition at Penn State's University Park campus in 1977 did indeed mirror (and complicate) in elaborate, telling, and consequential ways the discussion stat were taking place across the country about composition and did permit us to fill out our account of 1977 in ways that we could not have imagined beforehand. While Penn State's individual case is in some ways perhaps anomalous, it is in other ways highly instructive, for the general sense of crisis that animated the year 1977 as far as composition was concerned also animated the local institution--albeit with local twists. (86)
In the middle years of the 1970s, fissures had been developing in a successful system of writing instruction that had been in place for some years at Penn State. (86)
But as enrollments at Penn State increased, as the university pursued more of a research profile that emphasized faculty with doctorates, and as graduate studies in the English department consequently grew more important (and in keeping with most American universities, graduate studies in English meant literary study, not composition or creative writing), the formal designation "of composition" was phased out for English faculty, and composition instruction was gradually turned over to teaching assistants pursuing literary degrees. (92)
Making literature the focus of the course permitted literary scholars to promote and capitalize on their areas of interest. As Sharon Crowley has noted, "the practice of using literary texts in the required composition course carries enormous weight in the politics of English departments. [...] The presence of literature in that course affirms the status of literary studies as the defining activity of English studies" (Composition 87). The literature included within the composition courses at Penn STate performed such an affirmation, without question. The devotion to literary study kept to a minimum attention to composition and rhetoric. (95)
Chapter 6, Responding to the Crisis: Conversing about Composition at Penn State in 1977
Of what did the crisis consist?
...how to respond to increasing numbers of underprepared students, a statewide and university budgetary crisis, local visions of intellectual chaos and aimlessness in the humanities, and difficulties in English studies and in its composition program (105).
What did Ebbitts offer?
...[a] commitment to rhetorical education and her long-standing belief in the pedagogical seriousness required to teach composition" (106)
English 10: Expository Writing
English 20: Argumentative Writing ("The course aimed at analysis and argumentation for civic and practical purposes: to teach students to engage in public debates, to change policies or shape courses of action, to discover the causes of everyday opinions and phenomena" [109].)
The influence of process pedagogy...a four-page section dealing with how to teach "the process of composing in English 10 and 20 (111) and increased amount of prewriting and drafting (113)
In the spring of 1977, the Freshmen English Committee established as the first two goals of English 10 "to develop awareness of the nature of the composing process and help student improve their own procedures for composing, [...and] to introduce the art of invention--techniques for helping students discover what they know and have to say, want to say, need to say" (English 10 4). (113)
By 1977, instructors were expected to participate in students' writing processes by providing considerable feedback on student work-in-progress. (114)
Research in composition influenced English 20 in other ways... (115)
With the 1977 syllabus, then, English 20 had fully become the course in argument that Ebbitt and her associates had only begun to envision in 1975. The sequence of assignments reflected the composition programs' argument-centered, rhetorical-based, process-oriented philosophy of composition, responding directly to several currents of theoretical inquiry that had begun making their way into the program in the mid-1970s. (117)
Penn tate also began encouraging specific coursework in composition for graduate students to further ground them in the fundamentals of the subject...the department in 1977 began to require teaching assistants to take specific graduate coursework in composition theory: English 502, The Theory and Teaching of Composition, a three-credit seminar that some saw as a foundation course that would run parallel to the required introductory seminar in research methods, English 501. (it later became an elective and English 602 was created). (128)
They close with two conclusions...their's and one of the losers'. Here is theirs:
...traditionalists resisted the reforms of the mid-1970s, as best they could, for some years after. But in many ways, the opposition had lost. Though many faculty at University Park and the Commonwealth campuses for the next decade resisted to varying degrees the reforms of the mid1970s, over the long term what the winners called "reform" carried the day. By the end of 1977, Penn Staters had devised, out of a rather grand debate about a local crisis, a rather different composition program, one that amounted to a sustained professional response to a challenging set of new circumstances--circumstances nonetheless comparable to those in many other places and influenced by developments, intellectual and otherwise, around the country. (134)
By the fall of 1978, however, Frank, Ebbitt, and Park had arranged for four new tenure-line faculty to work on the problems. (134)
And so the reforms remained in place--a foundation to maintain and build on. By the spring of 1978, matters had been resolved at Penn State, for better or for worse, in a way that would last for five years until a change [in the academic calendar] prompted additional revisions. Those revisions, governed by insights gained by the invention of the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in 1981... (135)
The story of composition at Penn State in the 1970s can be read as a story of progress, a story of barriers overcome, improvements instituted, changes successfully negotiated. But there is another way of interpreting the events we have recounted, one that is not so happy... (135)
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